Duncan Tree Foundation
Duncan Tree Foundation , Inc.
240-43 141 Avenue
Jamaica,
New York
11422
United States
646 235 8522
http://www.duncantreefoundation.org
Ouida Duncan
Ouida Duncan, Christina Regan-Duncan, Chunyee Miot, CPA, Kiel Telesford, David Dungey
Duncan Tree Foundation is an international outreach organization dedicated to promoting health by: Providing education to communities about strategies for preventing, reducing and treating non-communicable diseases; Recruiting medical professionals from around the globe to increase medical training in developing countries; Securing medical equipment donations for developing countries, starting in Jamaica, to help under-resourced health care systems.
DTF Scoliosis Care Fund Project DTF Scoliosis Care Fund Project is our current initiative addressing our objective for facilitating corrective spine surgeries at no cost to the patients, educating the medical community in countries with under-developed medical resources on how to improve the management of difficult cases and recruiting highly skilled spine surgeons and Allied medical technologists from around the globe. In 2012 DTF organized two medical mission trips to Jamaica to assist a total of 8 young people with moderate to severe spine deformities - majority scoliosis cases. To this end DTF recruited 3 of the best spine surgeons, including Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei from the Hospital for Special Surgery, Dr. Ken Paonessa former chair of the Scoliosis Research Society Global Outreach Program and Dr. Vincent Arlet, Head of Orthopedic Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. We arranged for each patient to receive surgical implants for elective spine surgery, we also arranged for intra-operative neuro-monitoring during surgery (this neuro-monitoring is not currently available in Jamaica, therefore we working with one of our US partners who has agreed to offer free training in the US for 1-2 medical professionals from Jamaica. Our goal is to introduce neuro-monitoring as a core skill in Jamaica. Had these 8 surgeries been performed in New York City the average cost for each surgery would be somewhere in the range of $200,000-$300,000 per surgery. We also organized 3 CME lecture series to teach the medical community how to better manage difficult spine cases including scoliosis (all in partnership with the South East Regional Health Authority at the Ministry of Health). Over 250 CME certificates were distributed to local doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and other medical professionals. All of what DTF provided was at no cost to the patients or medical community in Jamaica.
